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How to Play the Lottery Safely?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2020

Haicheng Zhao Open the ORCID record for Haicheng Zhao [Opens in a new window]
Haicheng Zhao*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Xiamen University, Xiamen, Fujian, China
*
Email: haichengzhao90@gmail.com
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Abstract

According to the safety principle, if one knows that p, one's belief that p could not easily have been false. One problem besetting this principle is the lottery problem – that of explaining why one does not seem to know that one will lose the lottery purely based on probabilistic considerations, prior to the announcement of the lottery result. As Greco points out, it is difficult for a safety theorist to solve this problem, without paying a heavy price. In this paper, I first reject three existing safety-based solutions to the lottery problem, due to Pritchard, Sosa, and Broncano-Berrocal. Failure of these accounts reveals that there is something crucial missing in the safety principle. By way of remedying this, I propose to integrate a safety principle with a condition regarding one's own awareness of (nearby) error-possibilities. The resulting account, as I argue, enjoys a number of theoretical advantages, including its capacity to handle the lottery problem.

Keywords

Safetylotteryinductionawarenesstestimony
Type
Article
Information
Episteme , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , March 2023 , pp. 23 - 38
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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